Government Shutdown? If Only!

Well, time for a phony government shutdown. I say phony because all essential, and many non-essential, functions of government will keep ticking away. The media will be filled with pictures of the Statue of Liberty being shut down and commentators damning Republican members for their “intransigence” in not recognizing that every whim of Obama is eternal law. All humbug.

The truth is that we have a federal government that could easily be trimmed by 20 percent with most Americans being completely unaware that anything was being cut. We have one party in this country that still has members in it that have some semblance of fiscal sanity, and another party, that has a Jackass as its symbol, whose elected representatives assume the government is solvent as long as there exists thin air from which to make money appear. Real protracted deadlock, with the government going into a real shutdown, might lead the way to salutary reductions in spending. At least it would show the extent of the real budgetary problem. Instead we have a fake shutdown, that amounts to a lot of sound and fury signifying precisely nothing.

“When it became clear sequestration wasn’t going to be resolved, we stopped putting money in the kids’ college fund and put it in an emergency fund,” Mr. Nudd said, adding that he had started looking for a job outside the government. “We’ve cut back on a number of things. We canceled cable, we got rid of our land line, we cut out luxuries, the housekeeper’s not coming — things like that.”

Boo [expletive] hoo.
Company towns have been dying all over the country for decades — at least government can’t be outsourced overseas — or can it?

“After three years of frozen pay, unpaid furloughs, huge increases in retirement costs for new employees and the threat of massive layoffs at the Department of Defense and elsewhere, Congress and the administration need to keep their hands off of federal employees once and for all,” said J. David Cox, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 650,000 federal employees.

In fact, US median household income has dropped 7% from 2006 to 2012. Meanwhile, DC median household income has soared 23%.

I need to go to DC two or three times a year. Unlike the rest of us, the the restaurants and saloons are packed, housing prices are near 2006 bubble highs, and everywhere you look are cranes and new construction.

“The U.S. 10-year yield increased four basis points, or 0.04 percentage point, to 2.65 percent at 5 p.m. New York time, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices. The price of the 2.5 percent security due in August 2023 fell 11/32, or $3.44 per $1,000 face amount, to 98 22/32. The yield rose as high as 2.66 percent. It dropped yesterday to 2.59 percent, the lowest since Aug. 12”